Viewers are divided over whether the film should have shown Japanese victims of the weapon created by physicist Robert Oppenheimer. Experts say it’s complicated.
Viewers are divided over whether the film should have shown Japanese victims of the weapon created by physicist Robert Oppenheimer. Experts say it’s complicated.
I’ve been out of the country and we are lightyears ahead of other countries when it comes to reckoning with our past. No, we’re not perfect, but we’re a hell of a lot more open. You know how I know?
Because I was raised in Trumpland, PA and I joined the military and served in Mississippi, Texas, Oklahoma and Europe and I was able to learn about the Native American genocide, slavery, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki at school, and managed to absorb the rest through pop culture. We had a variety of differing assumptions when we talked, but we still talked. Yes, I heard that Lee was a gentleman but a trip to Gettysburg easily discarded that notion. My history teacher was quick to point out the founding fathers were opportunists.
There is stuff, like the bullshit we’ve been pulling in South America, that hasn’t gotten discussed. That’s true. But it’s not just the radical minority that’s aware the country is basically built on rivers of blood. The awareness is all over our pop culture.
You’re not hearing what’s good enough in your liberal state, but I have been knee deep in conservatism since birth and I’ve still managed to pick up on the horrors of our national history.
Now, just for comparison, go ask a Brit or a Frenchman about the Native American genocide and their country’s role in it.
The only places we should be comparing ourselves against in this regard are other colonies and former colonies: Canada, Australia, South Africa, Jamaica, Haiti, etc.
For example, compared with Haiti, we’re way behind.
Despite you learning about the Native American genocide, we still commit atrocities against them, en masse. We still leave open uranium waste in their areas. We nuked their desert environments hundreds of times. We are currently actively in the process of stealing more water from them. There may be some people who are aware, like you said, and for whatever reason the military appears to be a place where some units get conscious quickly while others devolve into xenophobia just as quickly, but the national conversation is about anti-science and anti-progress indians that deserve to be put in their place and stay quiet and maybe they should work on their alcoholism. The same is true for the national conversation about black people. We elected Joe fucking Biden. There’s only a conversation about his role in maintaining structural racism in radical spaces, and even fewer and smaller radical spaces are discussing Harris’s maintenance of structural racism.
Yes, Gettysburg discarded the notion that Lee was a gentlemen for you, and yet millions maintain that the Civil War pitted brother against brother and therefore the losers should be able to lose with dignity. And US LIBERALS are saying this!
But not that they’re entire project was to privilege white land owning men and that white men laborers should not be allowed to vote because they weren’t rich enough, and then of course everyone else. That the entire American project was to extract as much wealth as possible and had nothing to do liberty and justice for all but rather privilege for super profits and legal protections for white male land owners. Yes, there are some cracks beginning to open in less than half of the social studies classes, but they still celebrate Columbus Day and make pilgrim hats.
That awareness is not what I’m talking about. Most of that awareness is part of the rationalization/justification process. It’s considered ancient history, and it’s coupled with projection about other historical events. It’s not an awareness of injustice that we continue to perpetrate and participate in. It’s not understood that cultural genocide in America is happening right now. It’s not understood that eugenics was guiding domestic policy up through the 70s while we were sterilizing a third of Puerto Rico.
Everyone knows we nuked civilians. Most people will tell you it was better than the alternative. This is a performative level of awareness. It is not an awareness of the context and the implications. It is a minimal awareness required to operate in the world.